People

Co-Directors

Professor Stephan Feuchtwang
Department of Anthropology and Taiwan Research Programme, London School of Economics

Professor Feuchtwang launched the London Taiwan Seminar in 2000, serving as Chair. In 2003 the Seminar became the Taiwan Research Programme, affiliated with the LSE Asia Research Centre. Following the disestablishment of the Asia Research Centre in March 2016, the Taiwan Research Programme is currently an independent website at the LSE, and Professor Feuchtwang continues to act as Co-Director. Professor Feuchtwang is an emeritus professor in the LSE Anthropology Department, and has served as the President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (2000–2004). In 2002 and again in 2008 he was a member of the international peer review panel evaluating the research of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has been engaged in research on popular religion and politics in mainland China and Taiwan since 1966, resulting in a number of publications on charisma, place, temples and festivals, and civil society. He is the author of Popular Religion in China: the Imperial metaphor (Curzon, 2001), co-author of Grassroots Charisma: four local leaders in China (with Wang Mingming, Routledge, 2001), editor of Making Place: state projects, globalisation and local responses in China (UCL, 2004), author of The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts: Chinese lessons for adequate theory (De Gruyter 2010), and After the Event: the transmission of grievous loss in Germany, China and Taiwan (Berghahn, 2011).

Dr Fang-long Shih
Taiwan Research ProgrammeLondon School of Economics

Dr Shih served as Convenor of the London Taiwan Seminar (2000–2003), and of the LSE Taiwan Research Programme (2003–2009). She has also been a Research Fellow at the LSE Asia Research Centre (2003–2015), and she launched the continuing seminar series Taiwan in Comparative Perspective in 2006. She has been the Co-Director of the LSE Taiwan Research Programme since 2009 (until 2014, and again from 2016). In 2007 she established a journal Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, serving as editor. This was the first journal of its kind. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Chinese Studies (2016–2018), and previously on the Committees of the North American Taiwan Studies Association (2013–2015), and of the European Association for Taiwan Studies (2006–2007). Dr Shih specialises in the anthropology of Chinese religions with a focus on the issues of the family, gender, nationalism and civil society. Her publications include Gazetteer of Local Religion in I-Lan County (2003), Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan (co-editor, 2009), ‘Generation of a new space: a Maiden Temple in the Chinese religious culture of Taiwan’ (2007), ‘Generating power in Taiwan: nuclear, political and religious power’ (2012), and ‘Taiwanisation under god Nazha: the geopolitics of religious performance in 21th Century Taiwan’ (2015). She contributed chapters on ‘Women, religions, and feminisms’ for the New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (2010), and on ‘Reading gender and religion in East Asia: family formations and cultural transformations’ for the Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia (2014). Dr Shih is interested in using Taiwan as a point of comparison to build dialogues with the places or countries with similar social-scientific issues; she co-edited Special Issues on Taiwan and Ireland in Comparative Perspective (2012) and Taiwan and Hong Kong in Comparative Perspective (2014).

Advisory Committee Members

Professor Chris Berry
Film and Television Studies, Department of Media and Communication, Goldsmiths College

Professor Berry's research is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media, with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, and the postcolonial politics of time and space. His publications include (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004); (edited with Feii Lu) Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and after (Hong Kong University Press, 2005); (editor) Chinese Films in Focus: 25 new takes (British Film Institute, 2003); (edited with Fran Martin and Audrey Yue) Mobile Cultures: new media and queer Asia (Duke University Press, 2003); and (translator and editor) Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the origins of China's fifth generation filmmakers (Duke University Press, 2002).

Dr Kent Deng
Reader in Economic History, London School of Economics

Since 2000, Dr Deng has been the secretary of The Third World History and Economic Development Group, UK. He publishes in the areas of Chinese economic history during the pre-modern and early modern periods, and his works include The Chinese Premodern Economy (Routledge 1999). He has also worked as a radio journalist and broadcaster (for ABC in Australia), and he holds professional Mandarin/English translation and interpretation qualifications.

Dr Hillenbrand is the author of Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese fiction, 1960-1990 (Brill, 2007), and is currently working on a book-length project which investigates circuits of cultural exchange between Japan and Greater China.

Professor Christopher HughesProfessor of International Relations, LSE

Professor Hughes is Head of Departmant in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Director of the Asia Research Centre from 2002 to 2005. He received his PhD from the Department of International Relations in 1995, for which he was awarded the British International Studies Association annual thesis prize. Professor Hughes’ research focuses on the Asia-Pacific with special reference to Chinese foreign policy and politics. His publications include Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism (Routledge 1997), and Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (Routledge 2006). He has also published various articles on Taiwanese and Chinese politics, international relations theory and foreign policy in leading academic journals.

Professor Tim Murphy
Professor of Law Professor

Tim Murphy was born in Nottingham and educated at Nottingham High School and Downing College, Cambridge. He taught at Northwestern University School of Law and the University of Kent at Canterbury before joining LSE in 1978, where he has been Professor of Law since 1999. He has also taught numerous courses for the WEA and the TUC. From 1992-1995 he served as Dean of the Graduate School at LSE. He was General Editor of the Modern Law Review from 1995 to 2002 and is a founder member of the Editorial Board of Law and Critique. In recent years he has served at LSE as Chairman of the Graduate School Committee and Vice-Chairman of the School’s Appointments Committee and took up the post of Deputy Director in September 2005.

Professor Danny Quah
Head of Department of Economics, London School of Economics

Professor Quah teaches introductory courses in microeconomics as well as research courses in macroeconomics. He is also Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and Chair of the China Summer School Board for the LSE-PKU Summer School. Outside of LSE, he is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and a Governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and he has served on the Academic Panels of H.M. Treasury and the Office for National Statistics. Some of his weightless economy writings have been translated into 18 different languages. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and he was Programme Chair for the year 2000 European Economics Association Annual Congress.

Professor Charles Stafford
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics

Professor Stafford specialises in the anthropology of learning, schooling, cognition and child development, and has carried out extensive research in Taiwan and China. His current research focuses on learning and economic life from a cognitive anthropological perspective. He is the author of The Roads of Chinese Childhood (1995), and Separation and Reunion in Modern China (2000), and the editor of Living with Separation in China (2003).

Mr Stuart Thompson
School of Oriental and African Studies

Mr Thompson was formerly Lecturer in Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is also a committee member of the LSE Taiwan Culture Research Programme, where he has been the Chair of the London Taiwan Seminar since 2003. He taught a variety of courses, but focused on Chinese culture and society, and devised courses on the anthropology of education. He was also Convener of, and a teacher on, the interdisciplinary MA Contemporary Taiwan course. He has been researching Taiwan since his initial fieldwork in 1980. He specializes in the study of education, cultural literacy, social aspects of food, and death-related rites and representations. He is co-editor of Consuming China (Routledge, 2006), and of Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan (Routledge, 2009).

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